Priest, Christopher

The Prestige

The Washington Post called this "a dizzying magic show of a novel, chock-a-block with all the props of Victorian sensation fiction: seances, multiple narrators, a family curse, doubles, a lost notebook, wraiths, and disembodied spirits; a haunted house, awesome mad-doctor machinery, a mausoleum, and ghoulish horrors; a misunderstood scientist, impossible disappearances; the sins of the fathers visited upon their descendants." Winner of the 1996 World Fantasy Award, The Prestige is even better than that, because unlike many Victorians, Priest writes crisp, unencumbered prose. And anyone who's ever thrilled to the arcing electricity in the "It's alive!" scene in Frankenstein will relish the "special effects" by none other than Nikola Tesla.

Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics)

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.
The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.
Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.

The Invisible Man (Penguin Classics)

With his face swaddled in bandages, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, and his hands covered even indoors, Griffin—the new guest at the Coach and Horses—is at first assumed to be a shy accident victim. But the true reason for his disguise is far more chilling: he has developed a process that has made him invisible and is locked in a struggle to discover the antidote. Forced from the village and driven to murder, he seeks the aid of an old friend, Kemp. The horror of his fate has affected his mind, however, and when Kemp refuses to help, he resolves to wreak his revenge.

-First time in Penguin Classics
-Includes a newly established text, a full biographical essay on Wells, suggestions for further reading, and detailed notes

The Separation

The Glamour (GollanczF.)

Cameraman Richard Grey's memory has blanked out the few weeks before he was injured in a car bomb explosion. When he is visited by a girl who seems to have been his lover, his attempts to recall the forgotten period produce an odyssey through France and conflicting accounts of what happened. When Susan Kewley speaks to him of that time, he finds himself glimpsing a terrible twilight world - the world of "the glamour".

The Extremes

A bizarre and horrible coincidence draws FBI special agent Teresa Simons to England: on the same day that a mass murderer killed her husband and fourteen others in Kingwood City, Texas, another spree killer massacred seventeen in the small Sussex town of Bulverton. Teresa seeks to understand her husband's death by exploring the similar but unrelated event in Bulverton, as she once explored reconstructions of historical mass murders in ExEx (Extreme Experience, a brutally realistic form of virtual reality) to train for her FBI job. In Bulverton she finds a commercial ExEx parlor, which, she is horrified and fascinated to discover, offers a Bulverton mass-murder scenario. As Teresa explores both the town and the scenario of Bulverton, the separations between reality and ExEx, between ExEx murder reconstructions, between past and present, begin to blur--and so does the separation between Kingwood City and Bulverton, as Teresa realizes the simultaneity of the events may be more than a coincidence.

A New York Times Recommended Book, The Extremes received the British Science Fiction Association award for 1999. Christopher Priest's previous novel, The Prestige, won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Award. --Cynthia Ward

FBI Agent Teresa Simons specializes in investigating mass murder and serial killings. Part of her training requires her to participate in extremely lifelike virtual reality scenarios that are almost indistinguishable from real life. When her husband, also an agent, is apparently killed in Texas on the same day as a similar mass murder in a small English town, she realizes that the eerie coincidence may mean that virtual reality is impinging on her own. Now she must find a way to distinguish what is really happening from what is notbefore its too late.

Black Panther: The Client

T'Challa, chieftain of Africa's Wakanda nation, is known to most of the Marvel Universe as the Black Panther and sometime Avenger. Being the Panther is more than just being a super hero, it also represents something sacred to the Wakandan people. The demands on T'Challa are great but despite his best efforts, Wakanda and its mineral wealth are dragged more and more into the public spotlight. When T'Challa comes to America, government agent Everett K. Ross is assigned as an escort. He figured it would be easy work and just tailed along with the King's entourage. However, when the bullets start flying and the super-villains come calling, and political intrigue is discovered back home, Ross is in for the adventure of a lifetime. The Client, Ross's description of the Panther, befriends the befuddled agent but that may not be such a good thing.

Black Panther: Enemy Of The State TPB (Black Panther)

King T'Challa of the African nation of Wakanda, the coolly unflappable and cunning creature of the night also known as Black Panther, takes on global politics and street-level punks. The story reels from intense polictical drama to wild adventure to hilarious social commentary.

The Quiet Woman

After a Chernobyl-like accident at a fast breeder reactor on the north coast of France, Britain is shrouded in radioactive fall-out. When her best friend is murdered, a young writer is forced to make sense of the deadly world she now occupies.

Captain America & The Falcon Vol. 2: Brothers And Keepers

Haunted by his personal failures, Captain America comes to suspect that he has been under psychological attack from the rogue Navy Intelligence unit that created the so-called "Anti-Cap" Super Sailor when he discovers a direct link between this shadow group and the deadly killing machine M.O.D.O.K. But are they running M.O.D.O.K., or is M.O.D.O.K. running them? To find out, Cap has no choice but to turn to the only person who actually knows: the Anti-Cap himself! Meanwhile, the Falcon has gone on the offensive, shutting down the Rivas drug cartel. But there's a line between heroism and vigilantism, and Robbie Robertson fears the Falcon has crossed it and may never find his way back. Collects Captain America & The Falcon #8-14.